


Band-Aids

by Acai



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Childhood Memories, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Implied abuse, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, disney is a scam, excessive use of metaphors, i'll tag better when i don't have a splitting headache, implied child neglect, references of MEMES
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-11 22:23:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7909846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acai/pseuds/Acai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Iwaizumi remembers suddenly that in the real world there’s not happy endings. In the real world, problems don’t get solved and love doesn’t last and animals don’t sing. People don’t get found when they tell you they want to go away forever, and nobody’s there sitting on the rusty old swings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Band-Aids

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Español available: [Band-Aids](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10348809) by [aqualxng](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aqualxng/pseuds/aqualxng)



> I have such a bad headache and I thought writing gay fanfiction would help but it didn't and this is a headache of a mess of typos. Please forgive my sins and enjoy regardless of the aforementioned typos.

Band-Aids

(And other worthless ways to fix what’s too broken)

* * *

 

> **_Prompt: ‘sad matsuhanaiwaoi from iwa-chan’s pov’_ **
> 
> **_-Pidgestoked_ **
> 
> **_prompts  can be sent to Aobajosighs on Tumblr!_ **
> 
> * * *
> 
>  

Growing up, Iwaizumi’s parents had always attempted to feed him stories made for children in which a problem was presented, solved, and everyone lived happily ever after. Growing up without ever facing a challenge larger than not liking math assignments or the green things in his soup, Iwaizumi believed this wholeheartedly. After all, in a world where everybody was kind, what could possibly go wrong that didn’t have a good solution?

When Iwaizumi’s seven he meets the boy who lives across the street. They go to the same school, but Iwaizumi had never found interest in him. His mother makes him walk over and give them brownies and Iwaizumi decides that he’s not a _completely_ terrible person. If anything, Iwaizumi tolerates him.

They’re in the same class when they’re eight and their mothers make them walk home together. Their mothers walk ahead of them, talking about work and husbands and stores. Iwaizumi and Oikawa linger behind and hold hesitant conversation. It takes Oikawa a total of four days to turn hesitant conversation into talking as if they’ve always known each other. Iwaizumi obliges.

When the school year’s almost finished, Oikawa’s mom stops walking with them. Oikawa’s older sister walks with them when she can, but she’s got a job and lots more homework. Sometimes they just go home with Iwaizumi’s mom. Iwaizumi doesn’t ask why, because everybody seems fine with this situation. They end up continuing to spend time together over the summer, and Oikawa gabs on about aliens while Iwaizumi catches bugs. Oikawa’s not fond of bugs, making faces and whining about it, but he seems to take it in stride as long as Iwaizumi doesn’t make him look at the bugs.

By the time school starts back up Oikawa’s pouting and snapping at people all day. Iwaizumi doesn’t _really_ want to mess with this; if Oikawa’s hard to handle as his plain self, surely Iwaizumi will die trying to handle an irritable Oikawa? But his mother’s always taught him that you can’t solve a problem if you don’t handle it, and there’s a solution to everything. So he marches up to his friend to try and get it over with.

In a month’s time Oikawa’s dad has moved out and his mom works longer, and Iwaizumi’s sure that there’s a way that this problem will fix itself, but by the time they’re ten and nothing’s changed Iwaizumi realizes that there is no solution. Oikawa’s fine with it, still his annoying, chatty self. In fact, he seems happier and louder. But Iwaizumi’s thoughts dwell in the same place, because why would they choose to be apart and mad when they could be together and happy?

Iwaizumi’s mother explains that not everything has a solution, and Iwaizumi’s introduced to the real world for the first time. Animals didn’t sing and hair didn’t heal injuries and love didn’t last. And most of all, not everything had a solution. Iwaizumi’s ten and his whole outlook on life has been rewritten.

It’s kind of a shocking development.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Iwaizumi’s fourteen when his aunt and her loud baby move in with them. The baby wakes them all up at night and takes up room in their house, just crying and throwing fits about nearly everything. It’s a baby—of course it doesn’t know better, but Iwaizumi wished it didn’t have to stay with _them._

He probably would have resorted to staying over at Oikawa’s if his best friend wasn’t currently in the same predicament, with his sister living with them with her _own_ baby. Oikawa’s used to the loud crying, seeing how his nephew, Takeru, is already three and a half. Still, he’s loud and begs to be played with and runs around half naked making messes of everything.

They decide to spend their days at the creek because that’s the best solution that they can come up with. After all, in the real world things don’t have perfect Happily Ever After endings.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He’s fifteen when his aunt moves out and he starts high school. He relishes the quietness of the house, and he and Tooru spend their newly-quiet days sitting on Iwaizumi’s bed and staring at the ceiling. They don’t do anything except revel in the fact that they can be in the air conditioning without listening to a kid making noise.

They join the volleyball team, as always, and meet the only other first years on their volleyball team. They’re two scruffy-looking boys, both with messy hair and already rumpled uniforms. But they’re better solace than the boys who pawn their chores off on first years and haven’t got anything better to do than show off.

So they spend their practices in an awkward bunch. It’s a group of four, but they’re paired off in twos until one day in the middle of the year Hanamaki marches up to them and tells them all that the coach most definitely was making out with a woman in front of the gym. It may have taken a stalking session or two, but they’re friends by the time they get a new coach.

Two becomes four and Iwaizumi thinks that it’s definitely the perfect solution to the bossy, stuck-up second and third years on their team.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Having friends has pros and cons. There was pros, like the friendship itself and the fact that they now had _four_ places to go instead of just two. There was cons, like learning more about real life and arguing and having to deal with three people on days when he really didn’t feel like dealing with anyone at all.

It’s give and take, but Iwaizumi thinks he’s probably completely okay with that.

The more time that you spend with people, the easier they become to read. Meeting somebody new is like trying to read a book in a language that you don’t know. Bits and pieces, words that are familiar, things that you’ve heard before stick out to you and make a little sense, but for the most part you’re completely lost.

 Of course, you can study a language. You can study and study all the time until it makes sense to you, and then you open the book back  up and suddenly the story is there and in front of you as plain as day.

Iwaizumi thinks this is probably give-and-take also. This means there’s three people who he understands well—three people who he can be honest with and three people who he can text whenever and three people who can read him just as well, probably. But there’s three people who are also living in Real Life, where there’s no perfect solutions. Real people with real problems. Real life with no real solutions.

And as hard as Iwaizumi tries his best to cling to good things, he’s left scrabbling sometimes.

He’s left scrabbling when Oikawa’s dad comes back for a month and Oikawa’s angry for the entire month and acts angry for a month after (when his dad’s left again without a word) but they can all tell that he’s hurt. And Iwaizumi’s left scrabbling when Matsukawa’s dog dies and he’s upset for weeks, and then his _grandpa_ dies and Iwaizumi really doesn’t know what to say about either of those situations. He’s left scrabbling because those happy cartoons never told him what to do when your friends are  hurting and when dogs and people die.

And when he can read Hanamaki like he can read Matsukawa and Oikawa, he’s left clawing at rocks so smooth there’s nothing to hold on to. And being able to see that there’s nothing good to grasp but scrabbling anyway is harder than just letting things fall apart, of course.

He pretends like the rock isn’t too smooth. He has Hanamaki over when he can tell he doesn’t want to go home, and they all four sit on Iwaizumi’s bed until Iwaizumi pretends like it’s definitely too late to go home now and they just _must_ spend the night because there’s dangerous people out at night, of course.

Iwaizumi thinks they’re all aware that the dangerous people are the ones waiting at home, and he thinks they all know this is the reason that they spend the night. There’s nothing good to say about the situation, but he doesn’t think Hanamaki wants them to say anything at all. It’s not like this is new, not like when Oikawa’s dad came back for a month and left again, not like when Matsukawa’s dog died and then his grandpa died two weeks later, it’s really not like that. It’s not new, Hanamaki’s familiar with it. It won’t _go away,_ the hurting. It’s not like betrayal and grief, it doesn’t _go away._ The physical proof fades after a while, but it’s always there when Hanamaki has bad days where he bunches up under blankets and doesn’t say anything and they’re careful not to make a lot of noise.

The rocks are too smooth and Iwaizumi knows that there’s no perfect solution to this.

You can put a Band-Aid on a broken vase, but it won’t put the pieces back together.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Halfway through their second year of high school Iwaizumi realizes that he really shouldn’t like spending time with them _as much_ as he does. They’re his best friends, and of course they get along well, but he doesn’t think best friends appreciate the softness of their best friend’s laugh or the way that the sun hits their best friends eyes and he’s damn certain best friends don’t want to hold best friend’s hands.

Not like he wants to, anyway.

But it’s absolutely okay with Iwaizumi, of course, because love is one of the things that fairytales assure him always has a happy ending. He knows that fairytales are full of lies and the feeling of sobriety that comes with realizing this is so much that Iwaizumi is _damn certain_ he won’t be acting on those feelings.

It takes half a year for things to spiral out of control and the vase breaks to the point where Iwaizumi can’t even find the smashed pieces any longer.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Towards the end of their third year, Hanamaki shows up on Iwaizumi’s porch and doesn’t say anything until they’re sitting on the floor of his room. Iwaizumi watches the strength in his body seem to seep out as he leans sideways into Iwaizumi and continue to stare blankly at the wall.

“I want to go,” Hanamaki says finally. “But I can’t.”

Iwaizumi doesn’t turn to look at him, and his excuse is the fact that he’ll knock Hanamaki’s head off his shoulder if he turns his head that way. So he watches the wall with him. “Go where?”

“Away” Hanamaki’s voice is soft and raspy and tired and Iwaizumi doesn’t know what to say. The rocks aren’t just smooth anymore, they’re sloped. Iwaizumi’s scrabbling harder than before while he falls faster. There’s nothing to say, but his mouth is speaking anyway.

“Would you go alone?”

Hanamaki shrugs. “Probably.”

“Would you let us go with you?” Iwaizumi says, and his voice sounds too loud in the room even though they’re both close to whispering. “We’d go with you.”

“Not that kind of away,” Hanamaki breaths, and Iwaizumi thinks that he says it so softly that he wouldn’t have even been able to see his breath puff out if it had been winter.

Iwaizumi thinks on it for a minute, not knowing what other kinds of away there are. He gives up eventually, just sitting in silence. He thinks there’s something Hanamaki’s trying to tell him, but Iwaizumi hasn’t got a clue what. Hanamaki slumps down further eventually but keeps the silence all the same.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It take Iwaizumi twelve hours to figure out what other kind of ‘away’ there is. He realizes at ten at night, and he’d been half asleep at his desk trying to do math homework.

He’s not tired suddenly, sitting up and fumbling for his phone. It occurs to him that Hanamaki _had_ been trying to tell him something, and Iwaizumi had never said anything back. He sends Matsukawa, who lives barely five minutes from Hanamaki’s house, and it’s just a couple of words, but hopefully they’ll make sure that somebody will be there sooner than Iwaizumi.

Iwaizumi’s just scrambling down his front steps when Matsukawa calls him.

“Hanamaki’s not at his house—where did you want me to check?” Matsukawa sounds vaguely confused, but not alarmed. He never has much of anything in his voice except dry humor.

“He _should_ be at his house,” Iwaizumi marches forward faster. “That’s where he said he’d be.”

“Uh, right,” there’s a sound of a door opening from Matsukawa’s end. “Sorry, can I ask what this is about? I didn’t actually listen _super_ well when you called, cause like, it’s ten at night. I may have missed the details here.”

Iwaizumi doesn’t think there’s a whole lot of details, but he also doesn’t think he wants to have this conversation over the phone. So instead he just says, “I’ll explain soon. Is there anywhere else that Hanamaki goes to a lot? I don’t know,  places he likes that are open now?”

Matsukawa still sounds bored and confused when he replies. “I don’t know—the park, maybe? He likes that old gazebo by the lake, too. And…oh, he goes to the creek sometimes. Cause he’s a sappy little shit, y’know, he likes those kinds of places.” Matsukawa pauses and he doesn’t sound so lifeless when he speaks again. “We need to find him, don’t we?”

“Yes,” Iwaizumi says, changing direction to go to the park instead. “I’m by the park—I’ll tell you more soon. Can you check the gazebo?”

Matsukawa’s silent for a second, and then Iwaizumi hears a door again. “Yeah.” Matsukawa seems to have stopped asking questions at this point, trusting whatever panic must be evident in Iwaizumi’s voice because Hanamaki was trying to _tell_ him something and Iwaizumi completely _ignored_ him and Iwaizumi’s pretty sure that Takahiro wasn’t talking about a vacation when he said it was a different kind of going away. Iwaizumi jumps when Matsukawa speaks again, forgetting they were even talking. “I’ll call Oikawa, you two live closest to the lake… he’s okay, isn’t he?”

“He will be,” Iwaizumi replies, not bothering to say goodbye when he hangs up and sprints towards the park.

There’s raccoons and things rummaging through the trash and birds in the trees, sleeping. But there’s not any Hanamaki.

Iwaizumi walks further down the trail, coming to a stop at the end of the park. There’s a rusty old playset and the swings creak noisily in the dark, but nobody’s there. There’s not any signs of anybody being there. Iwaizumi remembers with a striking reverence that in the real world there’s not happy endings. In the real world, problems don’t get solved and love doesn’t last and animals don’t sing. People don’t get found when they tell you they want to go away forever and nobody’s there sitting on the rusty old swings.

In the real world there’s just sad story headlines about boys who couldn’t take it anymore as the headlines in newspapers that people read and frown at but move on without really feeling a thing. Iwaizumi thinks that’s really the sad thing. In the real world there’s sad stories and there’s nobody to be sad about them.

He’s almost ready to accept the fact that sad boys don’t get found in real life when his phone buzzes and lights up with a text from Matsukawa.

 **Message From:** Matsukawa

_He was at the lake, I don’t think hes rly okay. We’re going to my house tho, meet me there and explain whats going on?_

Iwaizumi texts back his affirmation, turning on his heel and deciding that just this once things might turn out kind of okay.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Hanamaki makes himself at home in a big stack of blankets, probably to hide the fact that he’s trembling and doesn’t want to talk to them. Nobody makes him say anything, all pretending like he’s just cold and tired.

Iwaizumi knows he’s tired, but not like the rest of them are. He knows that Hanamaki can’t sleep away his kind of tired, that he can’t take sleeping medicine to fix his problem. Iwaizumi _knows_ this, knows that the bruises go away from his skin but linger in his head and the mean things that he hears keep repeating and repeating until Hanamaki’s left in shambles, too shattered to glue back together.

Iwaizumi’s still slipping, still scrabbling, still fighting to find a foothold. There’s nothing to grab onto, but Iwaizumi decides to try and grab hold anyway.

“I said I’d follow you,” he says, well aware of the fact that the sun set a long time ago and it’s dark in Matsukawa’s room. “And I meant it.”

“You don’t need to,” Hanamaki’s reply is muffled from inside the blankets.

“I want to. I didn’t know what you meant,” Iwaizumi admits. “I didn’t understand what you were trying to say. But I get it now and I _will_ follow you. To there and back and to anywhere that you go, I’d follow you.”

The gears are spinning in Oikawa’s mind, but Matsukawa seems to get it. He probably knew, he can read Hanamaki better than any of them can. “I’d follow you.”

“I’d follow you,” Oikawa agrees, and he’s sobered up in a way that says he knows just what they’re talking about now.

Hanamaki doesn’t say anything for a minute, and Matsukawa peels back the layers of the blankets to look at him. Hanamaki sits up and wraps himself around Matsukawa, mostly to hide his face in Matsukawa’s neck. Iwaizumi’s aware of the fact that he’s crying, mumbling, “I don’t want to stay, I want to go, I’m tired.”

It’s not the kind of tired that you can sleep off. Sleep is like a drug, and Hanamaki’s got the weakest drug on the market. But Iwaizumi’s well aware of the fact that Hanamaki can sleep just a little bit better if they understand what he’s trying to say. If they understand that his sad isn’t their sad and his tired isn’t their tired, if they know where _away_ is, they can do a little better than they did that night. It’s the real world and it may end sadly, but it ends okay that night.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They’re halfway through their senior year when they have another serious talk, but this time Iwaizumi goes into the chat with three best friends and leaves with three boyfriends.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Iwaizumi is aware of the fact that he lives in the real world. He’s aware of this, and he tries to pretend anyway.

He fools himself with half a year of kisses and gentle touches and honest words that mean a universe and he kids himself with words like forever and staying, and somehow he forgets that not everything is singing animals and happy endings. He forgets that just because he’s fallen in love with three boys, who have fallen in love equally with them, that they’re too young to know a damn thing about the world.

They know the word love but they haven’t got a clue what it means, they know the word forever but they don’t know how long forever really is. They know the word _here_ and yet they forget about _away._ In the real world, _away_ is how stories end.

Iwaizumi is aware of this. He knows that their story will not end with Happily Ever After and singing rabbits and birds. He knows this, and yet he loves and promises and thinks of _here_ like he doesn’t know a thing.

And he somehow doesn’t expect it when they graduate and Hanamaki’s gone before they have a chance to say a proper goodbye. He’s not _another kind of away,_ but he’s not _here,_ either. He’s hours away, where he’s not _here_ or _there_ or anywhere at all but drifting, and Iwaizumi thinks that he’d follow Hanamaki there, he really would. He knows that Oikawa and Matsukawa would follow right along to the middle of _there_ and _here_ and they’d stay there like the puppy loved fools they really were.

But they’d stuck a Band-Aid on the shattered pieces and there was no way to fix the shattered vase without dropping all the plans they’d had. Hanamaki had known this, and he’d still chanced everything for _away._

Iwaizumi doesn’t really get it. He tries, but he never seems to get it right away. He pines after the boy with the soft laugh who left to go somewhere where bruises and yelling couldn’t follow him. He pines and pines but never follows, never reaches and never scrabbles like he’d scrabbled when Hanamaki had been _here._

He goes to a college where he’s thirty minutes away from Oikawa and an hour away from Matsukawa’s college. They all room together, because Matsukawa genuinely likes quiet train rides and because Oikawa and Iwaizumi are willing to take a thirty minute ride there and back to their own colleges.

It’s not four and it’s not two but it works out anyway.

It’s the real world, and in the real world sad boys don’t stay. In real life, sad boys disappear to somewhere where sad memories can’t chase them down and good things can’t follow them.

So Hanamaki leaves with a Band-Aid holding the pieces together, and Iwaizumi thinks that maybe he just wants to start over.

He hears Hanamaki’s name whispered on trains and he sees him online, because he’s out there and he’s doing something brilliant in the way that Hanamaki always did something brilliant.

So Hanamaki sweeps up the broken pieces he can find and he hunts down the ones he’s lost, and maybe he’s taken off the Band-Aid to try and heal on his own, but Iwaizumi hears about him from strangers who are _here_ to see how he’s doing out _there._ He stays and thinks and waits for a day when maybe they’ll go _there_ to tell him about _here._

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Hanamaki’s no more than a whisper on a train, and Iwaizumi thinks that’s just how real life works.

They’re all young, really too young to know a thing about love and loss and pining, but the three of them who stay are learning and teaching and finding things that they’d never thought about learning before.

Iwaizumi thinks Oikawa’s probably going to get there, someday, where he wants to be. He’s going to be up there with the athletes and the pros who devote their lives to the sport, and Iwaizumi thinks he’s known that since they were just nine year old boys walking home together after school while their moms talked from up ahead.

He thinks that Matsukawa, who’s never been a _big dreamer,_ will do brilliant things like the other two. He studies hard and makes goals and works like he always has to get places that he’s never seen.

Hanamaki stays a whisper on a train, but he’s not a headline that nobody reads and he’s not the tragedy that real life had set Iwaizumi up to brace himself for, so it’s not the worst outcome.

Iwaizumi and Matsukawa watch Oikawa’s games and take up the whole sidewalk on the way back, giving in to Oikawa and each holding one of his hands. Nobody talks about how they’re already spilling off the sidewalk and how they’d be a mess with four of them, but there’s nothing that really _needs_ to be said about the sad boy with the Band-Aid holding him together.

The real world is hard and sad and there’s never a perfect solution or a Happily Ever After, but there was something tolerable about the real world that didn’t make it as bad as it seemed. And if that meant not mentioning that four was better than three, then that’s what it seemed like they were going to do.

**Author's Note:**

> Comment and tell me what you thought of it, and feel free to send your prompts to Aobajosighs on Tumblr. Thanks~


End file.
